From W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015), illustrations from political cartoons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries highlighting two themes: polygamy as the racial corruption of the white family and polygamy as slavery.

Dr. Reeve’s thesis is that outsiders projected their own fears of race mixing onto the Mormons. In their minds, polygamy was not merely destroying the traditional family, it was destroying the white race.

Several illustrations used by Dr. Reeve come from the Rare Books holdings.

The Protestant white majority in nineteenth-century United States was convinced that Mormonism represented a racial – not merely religious – departure from the mainstream and they spent considerable effort attempting to deny Mormon whiteness. Being white equaled access to political, social, and economic power, all aspects of citizenship in which outsiders sought to limit or prevent Mormon participation. At least a part of those efforts came through persistent attacks on the collective Mormon body, ways in which outsiders suggested that Mormons were physically different, racially more similar to marginalized groups than they were white. Medical doctors went so far as to suggest that Mormon polygamy was spawning a new race. Mormons responded with aspirations toward whiteness. It was a back and forth struggle between what outsiders imagined and what Mormons believed. Mormons ultimately emerged triumphant, but not unscathed. A portion of the cost of their struggle came at the expense of their own black converts. Mormon leaders moved away from universalistic ideals toward segregated priesthood and temples, policies held firmly in place by the early twentieth century. So successful were they at claiming whiteness for themselves, that by the time Mormon Mitt Romney sought the Presidency in 2012, he was labelled “The whitest white man to run for office in recent memory.” Mormons once again found themselves on the wrong side of white.

Colophon
“This book is frankly experimental in character. It is the product of a one-month Topics course taught at The Press at Colorado College by James Trissel. Six students were involved in the planning and printing of the poem in this manner which turned out to be more ala prima and less seriatum than one normally expects in book printing. The students are Betsey Biggs, Tully Bragg, Kelly Cress, Leigh Fletcher, Brian Molanphy, and James Schuster.

The paper is Arches Cover and the type, A T F Garamond. The inks for color-printing are generally lithographic inks printed relief from zinc and linoleum.

Although the poem, “Inversnaid,” is in the public domain, Oxford University Press gave us its blessings. There are fifty numbered copies; and this is 12.”